Welcome to the State of Palestine, Main Export: Delusions
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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas waves to thousands of Fatah supporters in Ramallah. December 31, 2012.
Photo Credit: Issam RImawi/FLASH90
On Sunday, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree giving his cabinet two months to come up with regulations to issue identity documents bearing the State of Palestine logo.
The decree covers passports, identity cards, population records, vehicle and driving licenses, postage stamps, official papers and embassies.
Abbas reminds me of the cliché new business owner who starts by ordering stationary and business cards. I say, make your first sale, then go to Kinko’s.
That’s what State Dept. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland was thinking, I’ll bet, when she was asked on Monday to comment on Abbas’s renaming the Authority the “State of Palestine.”
“You can’t create a state by rhetoric and with labels and names,” she said. “You can only create a state in this context through bilateral negotiations.”
Nuland added that “our policy on continuing to call it the Palestinian Authority until such time that there is a negotiated agreement for a state with borders will not change.”
Phew… That’s gotta’ be a load off our mind. But the questions persisted:
“So you don’t really take a position on the decision to start calling themselves the State of Palestine?”
The spokesperson dutifully repeated her previous answer, more or less. It doesn’t matter what they name themselves, they could call it the Galactic Empire of Palestine, they’d still have to stop at an Israeli checkpoint and present their papers.
Indeed, Ynet reported that Abbas is not rushing to change passports and ID cards which the Palestinians need to pass through Israeli crossings.
“At the end of the day, the Palestinian Authority won’t cause trouble for its people,” Abbas’ spokeswoman Nour Odeh, told Ynet.
But PLO spokesman Ahmad Assaf sounded extremely militant on Tuesday morning, declaring: “The Palestinian leadership couldn’t care less about Israel’s objections to planned State of Palestine passports and other identity documents.”
“Since when does the occupier allow the occupied to attain liberation and self determination?” Assaf challenged. “If we had waited for Israeli approval, we would still have been living in the time before the PA (government was established), because Israel doesn’t want any Palestinians to live in this land and this is a fact.”
And vice versa…
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office said Abbas’s decree was “devoid of any political meaning and creates no practical impact on the ground. A Palestinian state will only be created as part of a peace agreement with Israel.”
tell a friendAbout the Author: JewishPress.com Senior Internet Editor Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published two fun books: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.
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As the child of parents who survived the concentration camps I have dedicated a my academic career and my clerical calling to educate the next generation to learn the lessons of the Nazi horrors. The first lesson of the holocaust is that the murder of6 million Jews in 21 nations did not begin with an edict to cast the Jews into the ovens. It began with a policy of demonizing the Jews as if they were less than human. Throughout WWII, the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, operated out of Hitler's bunker and broadcast and rantings that called for the murder of the Jews on Nazi radio, in the Arabic language, a daily radio message that was beamed to the middle east, while the Mufti actively recruited Arabs to join SS units that systematically rounded up and executed thousands of Jewish families in the Balkans.
Last Friday, on January 4th, 2013, Mahmood Abbas, the leader of what the UN has defined as the State of Palestine, issued a speech in which he praised the legacy of the Mufti of Jerusalem and of slew of Arabs who have murdered Jews over the past generation. To ignore Abbas's message is ignore the first lesson of the holocaust, which is that anyone who glorifies hose who murder Jews is to be held culpable in the advocacy of mass murder/.
It is therefore incumbent on every person of conscience to condemn Abbas and to break off all relations with him and the entity that he represents.
I await a response from the representatives of every Jewish organization and from every responsible cleric.
There is a adage in the Talmud which is that SILENCE IS AGREEMENT. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG